Disgaea 3 First Look

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Could this be the deepest Netherworld ever made?

By Jeff Haynes

It's no secret that strategy fans eagerly await the release of any Disgaea title from NIS America. While it may be a niche title, the franchise is well known for providing some of the deepest gameplay on any system, with multiple endings, gigantic battles and the ability to max your characters to level 9999. Clearly, this is a series for hardcore tactics fans, and PS3 owners will soon find themselves in luck, as NIS America will be bringing the incredibly deep series to Sony's most powerful console. At a recent press event, we were given an opportunity to get a quick glimpse at the amazingly deep title.

Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice is set at the Netherworld Institute known as the Evil Academy, where demons and other malcontents practice their specialized form of chaos before they unleash their will upon the rest of the universe. While we were told that there will be at least four separate storylines, we were initially introduced to Mao, one of the main characters of the game, whose father is the headmaster and principle of the Academy. Mao initially seems to be like any standard nerdy kid: he's totally into comic books, anime and video games, and is more interested in research than anything else in the world. However, after using his 1.8 million EQ (which makes him an evil genius, by the way), he decides that he needs to become a hero to challenge the Overlord for his title, and sets about trying to dethrone that figure. Nevermind that it's his father he's trying to defeat, he just feels like he has to do it.

What we found within the short time that we had with the game is that Mao and his companions will have a ton of additional features available to them even at the start of the game to help them in their "heroic quest." Granted, in the realm of Disgaea, even these tasks of heroism will involve skipping school, being a general menace to society and terrorizing people. After all, that's the only way to become an Honor Student at the Academy, instead of a goody too shoes Delinquent (they're all demons, remember?). But apart from beating up the traditional series punching bag Prinnies and abusing the other characters in school, Mao will be able to power himself up in numerous ways that might stand out to veterans of the franchise.

Fans of the Disgaea series are well accustomed to the Dark Assembly situation in those titles. In Disgaea 3, the Dark Assembly has morphed into a Student Council like club, where players will be able to propose rules and items that will affect the entire school as well as their party. They will also be able to use this feature to help them generate a couple of the new features included within the game, such as switching seats in their homeroom to help party members combine their skills in a feature known as skill merging. It may be somewhat complicated, but the basic gist of the feature is that the more you have a relationship with a classmate you sit next to, the more you can combine attacks and powers together to make incredibly powerful attacks. In fact, we were told that while players won't be able to break the Level 10,000 mark, they will be able to power their characters up to the point where they can cause more than ten million points of damage. Not only were we shocked to hear this, but once we saw it in action, we realized that our power leveling skills were definitely going to be put to the test.

That's right, I'm the Overlord's kid.

Again, we were barely able to scratch the slightest amount of the surface with the time we had with the title, but NIS America has spent a ton of time pulling out all of the stops with this title, including more features than any other Disgaea title has ever seen before. In fact, the development team made the idea of creating a title with millions of hours of play part of their design concept. As a result, they've added loads of new features, such as brand new Item Worlds and Character Worlds to maximize stats of soldiers and accessories, the ability to morph characters into weapons for use by other warriors, and even the expansion of downloadable content with new job classes and scenarios for the game. Even some of the save games that we saw featured characters in their mid thousands that had fully completed the title and were still learning devastating new abilities. We're definitely looking forward to bringing a much more in depth preview of the title in the next few weeks, when we can sit down and fully explore this rich demonic world. Till then, check out our new screens, trailer and interview with the producer and lead programmer of the title.